“How joyed my heart in the rich melodiesThat overhead and round me did arise!The moving leaves—the waters’ gentle flow—Delicious music hung on every bough.Then said I, in my heart, If that the LordSuch lovely music on the earth accord;If to weak sinful man such sounds are given—Oh! what must be the melody of Heaven!”
“How joyed my heart in the rich melodiesThat overhead and round me did arise!The moving leaves—the waters’ gentle flow—Delicious music hung on every bough.Then said I, in my heart, If that the LordSuch lovely music on the earth accord;If to weak sinful man such sounds are given—Oh! what must be the melody of Heaven!”
“How joyed my heart in the rich melodiesThat overhead and round me did arise!The moving leaves—the waters’ gentle flow—Delicious music hung on every bough.Then said I, in my heart, If that the LordSuch lovely music on the earth accord;If to weak sinful man such sounds are given—Oh! what must be the melody of Heaven!”
“How joyed my heart in the rich melodies
That overhead and round me did arise!
The moving leaves—the waters’ gentle flow—
Delicious music hung on every bough.
Then said I, in my heart, If that the Lord
Such lovely music on the earth accord;
If to weak sinful man such sounds are given—
Oh! what must be the melody of Heaven!”
Something of the same thought comes out in a more reflective way in many of the poems of Henry Vaughan,[12]a writer of the same age as Walton, and one, like him, now less known and read than he deserves to be. Take the following, in which Vaughan speaks of the vivid insight of his childhood in a strain in which some have thought that they overheard the first note of that tone which Wordsworth has sounded more fully in his “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality”. It is thus Vaughan speaks of his childhood:—
“Happy those early days when IShined in my angel-infancy;When yet I had not walked aboveA mile or two from my first love,And looking back, at that short space,Could see a glimpse ofHisbright faceWhen on some gilded cloud or flowerMy gazing soul would dwell an hour,And in those weaker glories spySome shadows of eternity;And feel through all this fleshly dressBright shootes of everlastingness.”
“Happy those early days when IShined in my angel-infancy;When yet I had not walked aboveA mile or two from my first love,And looking back, at that short space,Could see a glimpse ofHisbright faceWhen on some gilded cloud or flowerMy gazing soul would dwell an hour,And in those weaker glories spySome shadows of eternity;And feel through all this fleshly dressBright shootes of everlastingness.”
“Happy those early days when IShined in my angel-infancy;When yet I had not walked aboveA mile or two from my first love,And looking back, at that short space,Could see a glimpse ofHisbright faceWhen on some gilded cloud or flowerMy gazing soul would dwell an hour,And in those weaker glories spySome shadows of eternity;And feel through all this fleshly dressBright shootes of everlastingness.”
“Happy those early days when I
Shined in my angel-infancy;
When yet I had not walked above
A mile or two from my first love,
And looking back, at that short space,
Could see a glimpse ofHisbright face
When on some gilded cloud or flower
My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity;
And feel through all this fleshly dress
Bright shootes of everlastingness.”
Such thoughts may be deemed by some to be fanciful and not practical. Certainly they are not much in vogue at the present time. But as one has said, “I cannot conceive a use of our knowledge more practical than to make it connect the sight of this world with the thought of another.” Nor can any be more needed by us, or more consolatory. For is it not the experience of each individual as he grows more thoughtful, as well as the experience of the race, that the visible, the outward, cannot satisfy? Is it not the very best element in man that makes him feel forever after something higher, deeper, more enduring than the things he sees? If we turn aside from this tendency, and seek to quench it, we do so at the cost of destroying that which is the best, the noblest inheritance of our humanity,—the piece of divinity in us.
This suggestive power of Nature, and its unsufficingness, have been felt by all men who have any glimpse of the ideal in them; by none has it been more deeply felt, or more adequately expressed, than by him, the great preacher—poet as well as preacher—of our age. I mean, Dr. Newman. As the prose words in which he expresses this feeling are in the highest sense poetry, I cannot, I think, do better than give thethought in his own perfect language. He is speaking in the opening of Spring:—
“Let these be your thoughts, especially in this Spring season, when the whole face of Nature is so rich and beautiful. Once only in the year yet once, does the world which we see show forth its hidden powers, and in a manner manifest itself. Then there is a sudden rush and burst outwardly of that hidden life which God has lodged in the material world. Well, that shows you, as by a sample, what it can do at his command, when He gives the word. This earth which now buds forth in leaves and blossoms, will one day burst forth into a new world of light and glory. Who would think, except from his experience of former Springs all through his life, who could conceive two or three months before that it was possible that the face of Nature, which then seemed so lifeless, should become so splendid and varied? How different is a prospect when leaves are on it, and off it! How unlikely it would seem before the event that the dry and naked branches should suddenly be clothed with what is so bright and so refreshing! Yet in God’s good time leaves come on the trees. The season may delay, but come it will at last.
“So it is with the coming of that eternal Spring for which all Christians are waiting. Come it will, though it delay. Therefore we say day by day, Thy kingdom come; which means, O Lord, show thyself—manifest thyself. The earth thatwe see does not satisfy us; it is but a beginning; it is but a promise of something beyond it; even when it is gayest, with all its blossoms on, and shows most touchingly what lies hid in it, yet it is not enough. We know much more lies hid in it than we see.... What we see is the outward shell of an eternal kingdom, and on that kingdom we fix the eyes of our faith.... Bright as is the sun and sky and the clouds, green as are the leaves and the fields, sweet as is the singing of the birds, we know that they are not all, and we will not take up with a part for the whole. They proceed from a centre of love and goodness, which is God himself, but they are not his fullness; they speak of heaven, but they are not heaven; they are but as stray beams and dim reflections of his image; they are but crumbs from the table. We are looking for the coming of the day of God, when all this outward world, fair though it be, shall perish.... We can bear the loss, for we know it will be but the removing of a veil. We know, that to remove the world which is seen will be the manifestation of the world which is not seen. We know that what we see is a screen hiding from us God and Christ, and his saints and angels; and we earnestly desire and pray for the dissolution of all that we see, from our longing after that which we do not see.”
Such are the thoughts and longings which the sight of the vernal earth can awaken in a spiritual mind well used to heavenly meditations.
If some of us are so sense-bound that such thoughts seem fantastic and unreal to them, all that can be said is, The more’s the pity. Even the best among us will probably not venture to appropriate such thoughts as if these were our habitual companions, but they may have in some brighter moments known them. At all events they know what they mean, and are assured that as they themselves grow in spirituality, the beauty that clothes this visible world, while it soothes, does not suffice, but becomes more and more the hint and prophecy of a higher beauty which their heart longs for.
And now, in looking back on these several ways in which poets have handled Nature, two thoughts suggest themselves:—
1. The ways I have noted are far from exhausting all the possible or even actual modes in which poets deal with Nature, or, in other words, in which Nature lends itself to the poet’s service. They are but a few of the most prominent and obvious. It may interest some to look for others, and to add them to the classification here given.
2. Though one mode may be more prominent in one poet, and one in another, yet no poet is limited to only one, or even two, of these several ways of adapting Nature to his purposes. In the works of the greatest poets, those of largest and most varied range, perhaps every one of these modes, and more besides, may be found. To find out and arrange under heads all the ways in whichsay Shakespeare and Milton deal with Nature, would be an interesting study for any one who is young, and has leisure for it.
With one reflection I close this part of my subject. Any one who has ever been brought to meditate on the relation which the abstractions of mathematics bear to the Laws of Nature must have felt how exceeding wonderful it is. A system of thought evoked out of pure intelligence has been found reflected and, as it were, embodied in the actual movements of the heavenly bodies, and bringing the whole Physical Cosmos within the power of man’s thought—
“From star to star, from kindred sphere to sphere,From system on to system, without end.”
“From star to star, from kindred sphere to sphere,From system on to system, without end.”
“From star to star, from kindred sphere to sphere,From system on to system, without end.”
“From star to star, from kindred sphere to sphere,
From system on to system, without end.”
Such a one, I say, must have been filled with wonder at this marvelous adaptation and correspondence between the mind of transitory man and the vast movements of the most remote and permanent of material things.
A like, though a different, wonder must arise when we reflect how, in the various modes above noted, and no doubt in many more, outward Nature lends itself to be the material in which so many of man’s highest thoughts and emotions can work and embody themselves.
Of the poets and this visible world we may truly say,—
“They took the whole earth for their toy,They played with it in every mood;A cell for prayer, a hall for joy,They treated Nature as they would.”
“They took the whole earth for their toy,They played with it in every mood;A cell for prayer, a hall for joy,They treated Nature as they would.”
“They took the whole earth for their toy,They played with it in every mood;A cell for prayer, a hall for joy,They treated Nature as they would.”
“They took the whole earth for their toy,
They played with it in every mood;
A cell for prayer, a hall for joy,
They treated Nature as they would.”
He who has once perceived the wonderful adaptation which exists between the mind of man and the external world—how exquisitely the individual mind, as well as the mind of the race, is fitted to the world, and the external world fitted to the mind,—if he has once vividly felt the reality of this adaptation, he must have paused in wonder at himself, and at the world that encompasses him, and become penetrated with an immediate conviction, deeper than all arguments can reach, that the reasonable soul within him, and the material world without him, which on so many sides is seen to be the embodiment of reason, and which yields up its secret to man’s intelligence, and is so plastic to his imagination and emotions,—that these two existences so answering to each other, and so strangely communing with each other, are both rooted in the one Central and Universal Intelligence which embraces and upholds both Nature and Man.